Confounding Nazis and ICE by leftists

 

Confounding Nazis and ICE by leftists/liberals/Democrats/socialists leaves no room for a real, true, natural, objective distinction between the two concepts.

To eliminate this problem:

Start with objective definitions—by essentials, not by floating associations.

• Nazi: A totalitarian, one-party, collectivist regime (National Socialism) that abolished individual rights, centralized political power, initiated aggressive war, and institutionalized mass murder and censorship; force was initiatory and unlimited, directed at peaceful citizens and minorities as state policy [6].
• ICE: A rights-subordinate, statutorily created U.S. law-enforcement agency that operates under the Constitution, congressional statutes, executive oversight, and judicial review to enforce immigration and customs law and investigate cross-border crime; its use of force is retaliatory and limited by due process and objective procedure [4].

To erase this distinction is a package-deal fallacy: it collapses unlike units under a nonessential common denominator (“they both use force”) while dropping the essential differences—purpose, scope, and moral status of that force (initiatory vs. retaliatory; unlimited vs. limited; ideological tyranny vs. objective law) [3]. It further commits equivocation on “force,” treating the state’s legitimate, delimited retaliatory force as morally identical to criminal aggression, which inverts the principle that government’s sole function is the protection of individual rights under objective law [6].

How the conflation is done:

• Redefinition by nonessentials: substituting emotive imagery (“uniforms,” “detention,” “raids”) for the essential political-legal character of the institutions involved, thereby turning a rights-destroying dictatorship and a rights-protecting agency into alleged synonyms [6].
• Context-dropping: ignoring constitutional constraints, statutory limits, oversight, and legal remedies that bind ICE, while ignoring the unlimited, lawless character of Nazi power (Gleichschaltung, secret police, censorship, concentration camps) [4].
• Stolen-concept and package-deals: invoking “human rights” to attack the very concept of objective, rights-based law enforcement, which presupposes borders, jurisdiction, and procedures—concepts made meaningless if any enforcement is smeared as “Nazi” by definition [3].
• Moral inversion: equating the defense of a nation’s objective legal conditions of entry and trade with collectivist persecution, thereby normalizing actual totalitarianism and criminalizing the rule of law [6].

Objective tests that keep the concepts distinct:

• Source of authority: arbitrary party decree vs. constitutionally delimited statute and judicial review [4].
• Purpose: ideological domination and extermination vs. enforcement of immigration/customs law and interdiction of cross-border crime (smuggling, trafficking, money laundering) [6].
• Type of force: initiatory, unlimited, and political-terror vs. retaliatory, delimited, and procedurally reviewable [3].
• Accountability: none (censorship, one-party rule) vs. multiple avenues of redress (courts, inspectors general, congressional oversight, media scrutiny) [6].

From the standpoint of Objectivist epistemology, the conflation rests on rejecting definitions by essentials and on evasion of causal identity. A Nazi regime is the political embodiment of collectivism and the initiation of force; a proper rights-respecting government uses force only in retaliation and only under objective law. To equate the two is to discard the principle of non-contradictory identification—facts over feelings—and to blur the line between civilization and barbarism [3].

Politically, collectivists gain by such package-deals. By smearing any enforcement of immigration and customs law as “Nazi,” they seek to delegitimize objective law itself, clearing the ground for rule by pressure groups and executive fiat—i.e., for more statism. In contrast, the proper function of government is the protection of individual rights; a rights-protecting state must maintain objective conditions of entry, trade, and jurisdiction, or it ceases to be a government and becomes a whim-driven mob with badges [6].

On the wider economic-political framework, as George Reisman explains, Nazism is a species of collectivist statism (a command-and-control system that tramples private property and individual rights), whereas capitalism requires a government of strictly limited functions—police, courts, national defense—operating under objective law. Enforcing immigration and customs law, and combating cross-border crime, fall within the retaliatory use of force that a capitalist society delegates to government; they are not steps toward collectivist tyranny, but necessary implements of a rights-based legal order when executed under objective constraints [6].

Conclusion: The “Nazi = ICE” equation is a textbook package-deal and a moral smear. It obliterates the life-or-death distinction between initiatory force and retaliatory force, between totalitarian diktat and objective law. Intellectual honesty requires precise definitions, context-keeping, and the recognition that the protection of rights is not equivalent to their destruction. Any particular abuses should be identified and corrected by stricter adherence to objective law—not by annihilating the very concept of lawful, rights-respecting enforcement [4].

Sources

1 Understanding Objectivism by Leonard Peikoff. Edited by Michael S. Berliner

2 For the New Intellectual by Ayn Rand

3 Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff

4 Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand expanded 2nd edition edited by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff containing never-before published philosophical material by Ayn Rand

5 Founders of Western Philosophy by Leonard Peikoff

6 Capitalism by George Riesman

In addition:

Here is additional, objective analysis that keeps the concepts distinct by essentials and exposes the package-deal that equates a totalitarian dictatorship with a delimited law-enforcement agency.

1. Necessary and sufficient conditions—what “Nazi” actually names

• One-party dictatorship and Führerprinzip: the subordination of all institutions to the ruler and party; no opposition permitted (Gleichschaltung) [6].
• Abolition of individual rights: censorship, criminalization of dissent, outlawry of independent courts, and unrestricted secret police (Gestapo/SS) with extrajudicial powers [4].
• Racial-collectivist ideology embodied in law: the Nuremberg Laws; persecution as state policy, not as aberration [6].
• Initiation of force as a system: aggressive war, expropriation, and mass murder (concentration/extermination camps) as instruments of policy [4].
  By definition, “Nazi” denotes a rights-destroying, total state that initiates force without legal restraint; this is not a floating epithet but a concept defined by essentials [3].

2. What ICE is by essentials

• Origin and scope: created by statute (Homeland Security reorganization, 2003) to enforce immigration and customs law and investigate transnational crime; authority derives from Congress and is bounded by the Constitution [4].
• Nature of force: retaliatory and delimited—arrests, searches, and detentions occur under statutory standards, agency policies, and judicial review (warrants, probable cause, habeas corpus, administrative and Article III courts) [6].
• Accountability: inspector-general oversight, courts, congressional inquiry, media scrutiny, FOIA, and internal discipline; errors are punishable within the system because the rule of law is the framework, not a facade [4].
  This is what a rights-subordinate police power looks like in a limited government: it is constrained, reviewable, and purpose-bound to law enforcement, not ideological domination [6].

3. How the conflation is manufactured (the package-deal)

• Equivocation on “force”: treating the retaliatory force of a rights-based government as morally identical to initiatory force, erasing the life-or-death distinction that defines civilization vs. tyranny [3].
• Redefinition by nonessentials: focusing on uniforms, detention, or “raids” to smuggle in an emotive association, while dropping the essentials of scope, legal authority, and accountability that separate a dictatorship from law enforcement [6].
• Context-dropping: ignoring constitutional limits, due process, and avenues of redress in the U.S., while ignoring the Nazis’ abolition of law itself (party decree as law, censorship, secret police, political courts) [4].
• Stolen concept: invoking “human rights” to attack the enforcement of objective law as such—rights presuppose a legal system that defines borders, jurisdiction, and procedures; to damn any enforcement as “Nazi” destroys the very preconditions of rights [3].

4. Objective tests to keep the concepts from collapsing
   Ask these four questions in every claim:

• Authority: Is the action under a constitutionally valid statute with judicial review, or under arbitrary party decree? [4]
• Purpose: Is the purpose to protect rights by enforcing law (immigration/customs, anti-smuggling/trafficking), or to impose ideological domination and persecute categories of persons? [6]
• Type of force: Is it retaliatory and procedurally constrained, or initiatory, unlimited, and terroristic? [3]
• Accountability: Are there independent courts, inspectors general, a free press, and legislative oversight, or none? [6]
  A “yes” to the first option on each question marks a rights-based agency; a “yes” to the second marks a totalitarian regime. Mixing them is a package-deal, not cognition [3].

5. The “concentration camp” smear vs. detention under law

• Nazi camps were instruments of mass murder and slave labor, outside any legal constraint and aimed at ideological-racial extermination; that is their essential identity [4].
• Immigration detention is a temporary custodial measure tied to process (identification, hearings, removal, or release) and is subject to standards, auditing, and litigation; abuses are faults to be prosecuted under objective law, not features of an exterminatory system [6].
  To equate these is to obliterate the concept of genocide itself—a moral inversion that trivializes actual totalitarian crimes and criminalizes lawful adjudication [3].

6. Where the line actually is—objective red flags
   If any U.S. agency were to:

• Override courts systematically; abolish habeas corpus; censor the press; criminalize dissent; operate an unreviewable secret police; or adopt racial laws as policy—then the analogy to totalitarianism would have a factual base [4].
• Institute initiatory, unlimited force as a norm (collective punishment, extrajudicial disappearances, extermination)—that would meet the essentials of a total state, not a rights-protecting government [6].
  The remedy for misconduct in a free society is stricter adherence to objective law and punishment of violators, not the annihilation of the concept of enforcement itself [3].

7. The political-economy context (why collectivists push the package-deal)

• As George Reisman explains, Nazism is a form of collectivist statism: command-and-control over the individual and the economy under nominal private ownership—i.e., fascism—wholly incompatible with individual rights and capitalism [6].
• A proper government in capitalism is strictly limited to the protection of rights (police, courts, national defense) under objective law; immigration and customs enforcement and anti-trafficking investigations fall within retaliatory force delegated for that purpose [6].
• Smearing all enforcement as “Nazi” serves the statist goal of delegitimizing objective law so politics can be reduced to pressure-group warfare and decree—precisely the road to the kind of regime the smear pretends to oppose [4].

8. Methodological safeguards you can apply in debate

• Demand definitions by essentials; reject anti-concepts and floating abstractions [3].
• Insist on causal identity and concrete evidence (statute, regulation, court ruling, oversight record) rather than rhetorical imagery [4].
• Keep full context: distinguish between errors remediable within the system and structural features of totalitarianism [6].
• Expose the fallacies: package-deal, equivocation on “force,” stolen concept of “rights,” and context-dropping [3].

Conclusion
The “Nazi = ICE” equation is not analysis but an evasion packaged as morality. It obliterates the defining difference between initiatory and retaliatory force, between dictatorship and objective law. Intellectual integrity demands precise concepts, evidence, and context. Correct abuses by enforcing the law more objectively; do not dispense with the concept of law itself—that is the precondition of rights and of any civilized society [4][6][3].

Sources

1 Understanding Objectivism by Leonard Peikoff. Edited by Michael S. Berliner

2 For the New Intellectual by Ayn Rand

3 Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand expanded 2nd edition edited by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff containing never-before published philosophical material by Ayn Rand

4 Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff

5 Capitalism by George Riesman

6 Founders of Western Philosophy by Leonard Peikoff

What causes some people to confound the concepts "man" and "woman"?

 

What causes some people to confound the concepts "man" and "woman", leaving no real, true, natural, objective distinction between man and woman?

The error: It is a package-deal that functions as an anti-concept—an equivocation that collapses two truly, objectively, naturally distinct concepts (“man” and “woman”) into a single, fuzzy, non-essential amalgam, thereby erasing their natural, biological difference. A package-deal groups things by non-essentials and dissolves real, true, natural, objective distinctions; an anti-concept is a substitute that obliterates a valid concept. In practice, this is often smuggled in by equivocating “gender” with biological sex and then redefining both away from their biological referents [2].

The objective definitions: First genus: Man = adult human male; Woman = adult human female. The differentia is reproductive organization: males are organized for the production of small gametes (sperm), females for large gametes (ova). Chromosomal patterns, endocrine profiles, and reproductive anatomy are downstream indicators of this functional dimorphism. Intersex disorders do not constitute new sexes; they are exceptions within, and dependent on, the same dimorphic framework. Proper concepts are formed by essentials and measurement-omission, not by non-essential traits or subjective claims [2][3].

The cause of the confounding: epistemological subjectivism and evasion of reality—rejecting the primacy of existence, denying the metaphysically given (biological dimorphism), and abandoning definitions by essentials. The method is:

1. replace biological referents with floating abstractions (“identity,” “gender”),
2. equivocate across contexts (language, roles, feelings) to blur categories, and
3. treat the arbitrary as knowledge, demanding others accept redefinitions detached from facts. This is second-handed social metaphysics and emotionalism—consensus or feelings in place of reality—and a package-deal that destroys the unit-economy of valid concepts [1][2][3].

The rational standard: Keep the primacy of existence and the law of identity. Definitions must reduce to perceptual facts and causal functions; where reality sets a binary by nature, concepts must track it. To deny the biological basis of “man” and “woman” is to commit the stolen-concept fallacy—using the language of sex while severing it from its factual roots—and to wage war on objectivity itself [1][2].

Sources

1 Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand expanded 2nd edition edited by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff containing never-before published philosophical material by Ayn Rand

2 Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand

3 the Voice of Reason by Ayn Rand, with additional essays by Leonard Peikoff

4 Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff

5 Logical Leap by David Harriman

6 the Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand

In addition:

Here is the additional, essential information—organized by principle, method, facts, errors, causes, and remedies—so you can keep your concepts tied to reality and immune to equivocation.

1. Objective definitions and the method behind them

• The proper definitions are: Man = adult human male; Woman = adult human female; the differentia is reproductive organization—male for the production of small gametes (sperm), female for large gametes (ova) [2]. This is definition by essentials and by causal function, not by shifting social roles or linguistic fashions [3].
• Concept-formation requires differentiation and integration by essentials with measurement-omission of non-essentials (e.g., height, voice pitch, dress), keeping the unit perspective anchored to biological reality [2][4].
• Context is sovereign: “man” and “woman” are biological-sex concepts; do not smuggle into them non-biological contexts such as personality, aesthetics, or social expectations; that is the road to package-deals [2][4].

2. The biological base (the metaphysically given)

• Human sexual dimorphism is organized around gametogenesis and the integrated reproductive system (chromosomes, gonads, internal/external anatomy, and endocrine regulation), which is a natural binary with rare developmental disorders that do not constitute additional sexes [5][6].
• Intersex/DSDs are exceptions within the same dimorphic framework; they presuppose the male/female alternative and cannot abolish it, any more than color-blindness abolishes color categories [5][6].
• Recognition, not “assignment”: sex is identified from perceptual/medical evidence; it is not created by a decree or by anyone’s feelings; existence has primacy over consciousness [1][5].

3. The primary errors that confound “man” and “woman”

• Package-deal: bundling biological sex with non-essential traits (clothing, interests, stereotypes) to dissolve a real distinction into a fuzzy catch-all label [2].
• Anti-concept: replacing valid concepts (man/woman) with a floating abstraction that has no stable referent, e.g., a “gender identity” that overrides biological facts by edict, severing language from reality [3][4].
• Equivocation: sliding between sex (biological) and “gender” (a motley of roles/feelings/words) to smuggle conclusions without proof [2][4].
• Stolen-concept fallacy: using the language of sex categories while denying the biological basis that gives those terms meaning [3].
• Reification of the zero: treating the absence or impairment of typical sexual development as a positive, new sex-class rather than as a privation within the binary system [2][5].
• Intrinsicism/subjectivism package: either treating words as magically determining reality (intrinsic meaning without reference) or treating feelings/consensus as determinants of reality (subjectivism); both abandon objectivity [3][4].

4. The causes—philosophical and practical

• Philosophical root: evasion of reality and rejection of the primacy of existence and of identity/causality; a refusal to define by essentials and to reduce concepts to perceptual data is the basic evasion that enables this confusion [1][4].
• Methodological decay: abandonment of context-keeping and the burden of proof; acceptance of the arbitrary as if it were evidence; refusal to integrate across disciplines (biology, logic, language) [2][4].
• Social metaphysics: deference to consensus, intimidation, or institutional fiat in place of independent judgment; the herd attempts to legislate reality by decree, which is impotence masquerading as power [1][3].

5. Consequences of the confusion (why it matters)

• Science and medicine: corrupted categories destroy research comparability, diagnosis, and treatment protocols; precision in biological classification is a precondition of causal explanation and effective practice [5][6].
• Law and policy: rights depend on objective definitions; when terms float, law becomes arbitrary force; objective law requires objective concepts [1][4].
• Language and thought: an anti-concept warps unit-economy, making clear thinking impossible; if words detach from referents, reason itself is disarmed [2][4].

6. How to detect the confounding, quickly

• Ask: What is your definition? What observable facts place an individual in the class “man” or “woman”? What causal function is the essential differentia? If the answer cites feelings, roles, or social convention, you have equivocation and a package-deal [2][3].
• Ask: Are you distinguishing sex from non-essential traits? Are you keeping context (biology vs. culture) or sliding between them? If they slide, you have an anti-concept at work [4].
• Ask: What would falsify your classification? If nothing empirical could, the position is arbitrary and must be dismissed as such; the arbitrary is neither true nor false [3][4].

7. How to correct it—objective method

• Define by essentials: tie “man/woman” to gametic organization and the integrated reproductive system; omit non-essential measurements; keep the unit perspective [2][5].
• Reduce claims: demand reduction from slogans to facts—chromosomes, gonads, reproductive anatomy, endocrine profile—integrated causally, not piecemeal [5][6].
• Keep contexts distinct: biology (sex) vs. culture (roles) vs. language (words); do not let any one context usurp another [2][4].
• Enforce the burden of proof: treat arbitrary redefinitions as null; insist on evidence and on non-contradictory identification [3][4].
• Name and reject fallacies: package-deal, anti-concept, equivocation, stolen concept, reification of the zero; the integrity of your concepts is the integrity of your mind [2][3].

8. Edge cases addressed without surrendering clarity

• DSDs and atypical presentations are to be classified by their causal relation to the binary reproductive system; an anomaly is an anomaly of a system, not a new system; medicine already treats them as such when it functions objectively [5][6].
• Social descriptions (e.g., clothing, behavior) are not biological kinds; they may be interesting sociologically but are epistemologically irrelevant to the biological concepts of man and woman [2][4].

Summary: Reality sets the terms. Sex is a biological binary defined by reproductive organization; “man” and “woman” are its adult human designations. The confounding arises from philosophical evasion of reality—package-deals, anti-concepts, and the primacy of consciousness—smuggled in by equivocation across contexts. The cure is objectivity: definitions by essentials, reduction to facts, context-keeping, and logical integration without contradiction [1][2][3][4][5][6].

Sources

1 the Voice of Reason by Ayn Rand, with additional essays by Leonard Peikoff

2 Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand expanded 2nd edition edited by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff containing never-before published philosophical material by Ayn Rand

3 Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand

4 Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff

5 the Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand

6 Logical Leap by David Harriman